By Dave Andrusko

You always, always know when a pro-lifer has hit a particularly raw nerve. The pro-abortion set falls all over themselves in derision and mock ridicule.

The gist of it is that nobody should believe what their own candidates, in fact, say they approve of and, if they did (reversing course), they’d understand how reasonable it is, say, to plunge surgical scissors into the backs of the heads of babies about to be born and then vacuuming out their brains like so much soot.

So we read counterfactual story after counterfactual story that Hillary Clinton really carried the day in the debate last night over partial-birth abortions and Clinton’s position (as she told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd) that “the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights,” and affirmed(when asked by Paula Faris of The View) including “on its due date, just hours before delivery.”

My favorite, because it was bizarre even by the anti-life’s standards, came from someone named Tara Haelle. Commenting on Donald Trump’s spot-on statement that it is Clinton’s position that “you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day,” she writes

he appears not to realize that the term for that — and it’s done considerably less violently — is a Cesarean section, a common, safe procedure by which about a third of women deliver their babies every year. In other words, Trump described how more than a million women every year give birth. It’s quite legal, and generally a cause for celebration.

She hastens to add that she is not being flippant but that there aren’t ninth month abortions. But note that Clinton–a lawyer who, if President, would be nominating justices to the Supreme Court– was asked specifically by Faris just how far Roe v. Wade extends:

FARIS: I want to ask you about some comments that you made over the weekend on Meet the Press. You said, ‘The unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.’ My question is at what point does someone have constitutional rights, and are you saying that a child, on its due date, just hours before delivery still has no constitutional rights?

CLINTON: Under our law that is the case, Paula.

Predictably Haelle uses the occasion to recycle all the myths protectors of partial-birth abortion spun out of whole cloth which were thoroughly debunked during the long, long debate, culminating when the Supreme Court upheld the ban on partial-birth abortions.

But her larger point, and what is the background of other chortling posts, is that you can’t or at least shouldn’t, talk about “ripping” out babies.

Are we supposed to believe that there is no such thing as dismemberment abortions, or that you dismember an unborn baby without ripping and tearing limbs?

Kind of.

A few months ago Emily Crockett, writing at Vox.com, informed us that “Pro-life advocates are trying to ban abortion by grossing people out about it.”

According to Crockett

D&E bans are quickly becoming the latest trend in anti-abortion lawmaking at the state level. They have colorful names like the “Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act.” And some advocates and lawmakers are using them to focus on the lurid details of later abortion procedures, in hopes of turning more Americans against abortion and making the procedure easier to outlaw or restrict.

Of many counters, here are just two.

#1. Crockett tells us that pro-lifers want to “make D&E the new ‘partial-birth abortion,’” admitting (by the way) “[T]he catchy ‘partial-birth’ rebranding by anti-abortion advocates, and the focus on the unpleasant details of the procedure, helped to sway the public against it — and even to sway more people against abortion in general for a time.”

If she means that pro-lifers fully intend to persuade the public that the dismemberment technique is every bit as brutal as partial-birth abortions, I plead guilty. Of course, Crockett believes that both designations are bogus–mere “rebranding”–so it’s up to the likes of Crockett to storm around in high dudgeon.

But pro-lifers also believe that the reasoning on display in the Supreme Court Gonzales decision that upheld the federal ban on partial-birth abortions (which are now illegal) is fully applicable to banning a “technique” (such a neutral sounding term) that tears and pulverizes living unborn human beings, rips heads and legs off of tiny torsos as the defenseless child bleeds to death.

It is a measure of how trafficking in abortion dehumanizes practitioners and defenders alike that their default position is to tell us that all “surgery” is gross.

Overall, Trump had, by far, his best debate performance last night. On abortion, he accomplished two major objectives.

He contrasted his own position on abortion with Clinton’s and showed just far from the mainstream the Hillary Clintons of this world are in guaranteeing abortion on demand until birth–and paid for with your tax dollars.